The Lady in the Tower
by TheMysteryReviewer3624
Summary: A melancholy Twilight fairy tale. A dark lady under a curse waits in a tower for someone to set her free. Disclaimer: We all know I own nothing but my imagination. DISCONTINUED.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This is a rewrite. I hope it doesn't disappoint any of my readers, scarce though they are.

Far away, there is a hollow hill that lies open to the sky. Within the hill, there is a crystal tower. It gleams when the light hits it, and glistens in the rain. It sits sunk so deeply in the hill that even from the highest room, you cannot see daylight. The inhabitant of the tower has spent her whole life in night.

She sits at her desk, dark brown hair spilling over her shoulders. The silver pen moves quickly over the parchment, in the grip of a pale, graceful hand. This is the fifth draft. Her eyes are focused on the page: they are a warm brown colour.

_To whosoever receives this letter: I do not know who you are. You do not know who I am either, most likely. My name is Bella, but most call me "the dark lady of the tower" or, if they have been listening to the rumours, "the lady with the dead eyes"._

_For years I have lived in a crystal tower, within a hollow hill. The hill is surrounded by a forest, and on the outskirts of the forest is a village. The tower is set deep within the hill: so deep that I have never seen daylight. At any time of day or night, I can look out of my window and watch the stars dance across the sky. _

The stars are her friends. She learned their names when she was small, and used to spend hours staring out of the window, naming them one by one. Living in a tower-inside-a-hill is not conducive to making human friends. There is a witch who visits sometimes, a lovely honey-haired girl called Angela. She is kind and funny and she sometimes lets Bella help her with spells. Angela can be counted as a friend.

_I am forced to remain within this tower by a spell. The same spell causes the people of the surrounding villages, those of old bloodlines, to guard me as wolf-men – shape-shifters. However, the true power of the curse is grief. For as long as I can remember, I have felt a great heart-heaviness, with neither beginning nor end nor reason. I have neither care to live nor will to die._

Some of the wolves are kind, too. Jacob is like a brother to her, or almost a son, although she doesn't see him much any more. To anyone else he would have been a sun to warm them, but she feels only a candle-flame's worth of light and heat. It's not his fault. It's not his fault, either, that he and her handmaiden Nessie – a girl who was like a sister to her, or almost a daughter – fell in love almost as soon as they met. It's not his fault that the two of them cannot come near the tower any more, for fear of worsening her grief.

_I can live in the tower without fear of hunger or thirst. There is a spring in one of the tower rooms that I can drink from, and the wolf-men bring me food, prepared by their wives. But I am lonely here. I can see the world outside – some of it – through pools of water that act like magic mirrors, but that only worsens the loneliness. I watch others laugh and talk, and know that I will never have those friendships._

The pools of water sometimes show her the rumours about the tower. She has heard herself described as a princess, or a little girl, or a dark sorceress. One of them – a small girl with dark, wildly curly hair – is particularly spiteful. Her name, Bella remembers, is Jessica. She wonders what she could ever have done to Jessica to hurt her so. Perhaps it is the fascination that some of the young men show with the tower. Bella knows they are not interested in her, but rather in the adventure, so she is not a threat to Jessica's suitors: but perhaps Jessica doesn't know that.

_I write to you because of the terms of the spell. There is only one person who can release me from it. I am desperate to be released. This grief presses on me so heavily that I cannot bear it. It will drive me insane. Sometimes I think I am insane already. I beg of you to help me._

Angela visited a soothsayer recently, named Alice. "Something is coming for you," she confided to Bella, afterwards. "That's all she would tell me. She said it was difficult to see your future, because of the spell, but some kind of change is definitely on its way. So take hope." Bella does more than take hope; she clings onto it for dear life. If there is one thing she needs, it is hope.

_Only my true love can bring me safely out of the tower and release me from the curse. So I pray you, if you might be my true love – if you think you could ever love the woman with the dead eyes who has never seen the light of day – please find me. Please make me want to live. _


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: Thank you to all the lovely people who reviewed, subscribed, or added this story to their favourites. If it wasn't for them I wouldn't have bothered to write this. The first chapter went down pretty well: I hope this one doesn't disappoint. **

**Disclaimer: I own Twilight… wait, what? *consults with lawyer* Really? Oh. Um, it appears I don't own Twilight. I must be going delusional. Again. **

Within the hills, a small fire glows. The man sitting by it is tall, and subtly muscled. His bronze hair is tangled, his skin ice-pale. Green eyes survey the horizon. This is the worst time, he thinks, when there is no task to complete and nothing to focus his mind on. This is the time when his mind wanders reluctantly back to his past.

"_You killed someone, Edward," his father says, his voice filled with a terrible compassion__. "You killed a man. Not in battle. Not in any heroic way."_

"_You know what he did," Edward snarls, his anger like freezing fire. "I've told you, I was trying to save the girl. Will you punish me for attempting to do what is right?" _

"_This is for the good of the kingdom," his Majesty King Carlisle the Peacemaker tells his son, wearily. "I cannot give it an heir that the people do not trust. I am not disowning you, I am not banishing you, and I am not accusing you. Be thankful for small mercies."_

_Edward bows his head. He is trying to grasp what is happening to him, but his mind refuses to accept it. He barely comprehends the next words his father utters._

"_I, King Carlisle of the Kingdom of Washington, also known as the Peacemaker, do formally revoke all royal privileges of my son Edward, formerly the Crown Prince."_

_Then suddenly realization bursts in upon him, and it is as if everything in him has suddenly gone up in flames: the anger and pride is all-consuming, all-devouring, and the small part of him that has remained sane is terrified, because _there are no boundaries left_._

"_You can stay in the palace, if that is your will," Carlisle offers gently. "You're certainly an accomplished enough scholar that you could get a place in the library, and your musicianship would be more than enough to allow you to become a minstrel. You're well-liked here, if nowhere else at the moment. Your family don't want to lose you, Edward."_

"_Too bad," he replies, cold fury in each syllable. "You lost me when you chose not to trust me, Father. You lost me when you labelled me a killer. I'll be leaving in the morning. No goodbyes, if you please: I'm not in the mood for them." _

That was when he left Washington, travelling to the Assassin's Guild, deep within the underground city of Volterra. Becoming an assassin left a permanent mark on him – or perhaps, more accurately, a wound. He saw things that, as Crown Prince Edward, would have disgusted him. As Edward the assassin, he simply watched, letting boiling fury cool into icy detachment.

He'd taken a disliking to the leaders of the Guild, though. He really ought to have seen it coming: he was the best at what he did, so it made sense for them to use him for the worst hits. But there were some lines he was not willing to cross. That was when he went out on his own. He'd soon made a name for himself in the criminal world. He is the best in the business: he'd become that way half out of pique – if his father was going to label him a killer, he was going to _be_ a killer – and half because he hated shoddy work. _And partly_, a small voice inside of him whispers, _because it allows you to kill people painlessly. You don't enjoy killing, even if it is your job. _

His…clients pay well. He never gets the benefit of the money: it is all anonymously donated to various orphanages and institutions in his homeland. A nod to who he would have been, had he remained a crown prince.

Still, there is enough that when he becomes sickened by his occupation he can go out into the wilds and simply survive for a while, watching the seasons. He is always alone: he prefers it that way. Once he thought he could confide in someone, but Tanya – beautiful though she might have been – was as false as her many personas and as deadly as the knives she carried.

Sometimes he almost regrets his decision. His proud, foolish decision. Sometimes, when he remembers the tears on his mother's face and her wail of despair that subsided into soft, muffled, heartbreaking sobs. Almost.

But he made his choice. He will not turn back.

As he lifts his head, the wind ruffles his hair, and with the wind comes a faded piece of parchment. He opens it up. It is a letter. He begins to read.

_To whosoever receives this letter: I do not know who you are. You, most likely, do not know who I am. My name is Bella, but most call me "the dark lady of the tower"…_


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: I'm really enjoying writing this story – I hope you are all enjoying reading it. I have plans, so hopefully I should update quite a lot. Happy reading! **

**Disclaimer: I own Twilight! … No, please, your Honour, I didn't mean to breach the copyright, honestly I didn't! I plead insanity! **

Bella dreams.

This is a rare thing. She doesn't sleep very much at all, and when she does she is much too tired to dream, since she always cries herself to sleep. But tonight the ancient grief seems to have lifted slightly.

Bella dreams of hope.

_Edward has come to a great forest. He has been trekking through the hills for days, looking for the crystal tower deep within the hill. This… Bella intrigues him. He wants to know more about her. About her grief. About her loneliness. And if he could help her… it would be the first time in a long time that he has been able to really help anyone. He did not realise how much he had missed it. _

_He enters the forest. He has always loved forests. Life all around him, but none of the inanity of human life. This forest is like a dark hall, tree trunks as pillars, golden shafts of light falling softly here and there. It smells green. It smells of life. _

_Then…_

_He hears them before he sees them. Giant wolves. Each one's fur is a different colour: there is a silvery one, a reddish-brown one, a black one, a deep brown one… it doesn't matter how many there are. There are _too many_, that is the point. _

_They are immensely strong: he can see it in the way they move. They are also impossibly fast, and judging by how soon they arrived after he did, they have enhanced senses. No real wolf is this powerful. Therefore, these are the "wolf-men" that protect Bella. _

_He will not kill them. He knows he can. An assassin is trained to be immensely strong and impossibly fast, and to enhance their senses. And an assassin is trained to be cunning, to kill with the minimum chance of discovery or mistakes. But since these are the dark lady's protectors, he will leave them alive. After all, he may not be able to help her, and then she will need them._

_Jacob races with the other wolves to where the man stands. He reeks of death. Sam, the leader of the pack, knows of this man by reputation. _

_He is the world's best assassin. _

_And since there is nothing in this forest worth killing other than Bella, it stands to reason that this man is here to kill her. _

_He and Seth head straight for the man, fury pulsing in their blood. They are the only two who really love Bella – in a brotherly way, of course. Quil and Embry have had more contact with her, being Jacob's friends, so they feel a vague fondness, but nothing more. The others see protecting "the Lady", as they call her, as a duty. _

_But he and Seth really care about her. He had loved her more than he would have loved a sister – more than he _did _love his two sisters – and he had wanted to take care of her and make her smile forever. Then he had met Nessie. And since then, neither could go near her. Their closeness only made the sadness worse. The guilt he feels for that is unimaginable. So this is how he will care for her: by protecting her. _

_They get in a lucky strike, a gash in the man's arm, and only because there are two of them. The others can't lay a paw on him. He is too quick for them, and too clever._

"_Stop!" _

_It is Nessie. She has run all the way from the wolf-maidens' cottage – she always was fast. She is staring at the bronze-haired man with a painful, desperate hope in her eyes. _

_Far away, Alice the soothsayer sits up suddenly. Two forces are meeting, somewhere. Something that was meant to happen is coming to pass. Fate is moving, slowly, but speeding up all the time. _

_It is all beginning now. _Good luck to you, dark lady Bella, _she thinks. _

_Edward watches the bronze-haired girl gasp, trying to regain her breath after her agonized shriek of "Stop!" She has obviously been running for some time. _

"_He's – not – here – to – hurt – Bella!" she pants. "He's – here – about – the curse!" _

_Edward thinks. He does not recall a clairvoyant girl with hair like his mentioned in the letter. "Who are you, and why are you so sure?" he says coolly. _

_The girl looks at him as if to say: _Don't pretend you don't care about her_. "I was once her handmaiden," she says aloud. "I left her to be with Jacob, but I never stopped loving her."_

_Edward can feel himself becoming angry. She knew of the curse, and yet she left Bella? He does not show his anger. "You have not yet answered my second question," he points out. _

_The bronze-haired girl's eyes blaze as she looks at him. Her gaze is too intense. "I feel it in my bones," she states simply, defiantly, as if daring him to laugh at her. _

_Edward knows that look. It is the same look his mother Esme has when she sees someone who needs help. He has learned not to underestimate it. It almost angers him. How dare this traitor girl remind him of his mother? _

_Then he looks back into her eyes, and sees pain and love and confusion and above all a desperate hope. And he knows it is true: she loves Bella. _

_The girl's eyes flicker towards the reddish-brown wolf. This must be her Jacob. Looking at the two of them, Edward understands why they had to leave Bella alone. Better for her to be alone than to have to face this blessed togetherness, this bliss, every day, in the face of her own anguish. _

_He waits. The wolves move aside. _

_He walks on, into the forest._

Bella wakes up. She does not remember the dream.

At least, not until she sees the bronze-haired man climbing through her window.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Enjoy! And review!

Whatever he had expected, it was not this.

It had taken Nessie several minutes of impassioned pleading even to convince the wolves to take on human form again. It had taken half-an-hour more to persuade them that he meant no harm to them or to their lady.

"_He's an assassin!" one of them snarled – the one that had been the silver wolf, Edward recalled. "Why should we trust him? How _can _we trust him?" _

"_Why would he want to kill Bella?" a younger one pointed out. "She's never harmed a soul. There would be no profit in it for him. Shouldn't we try to help Bella any way we can?"_

"_I can't believe you're even considering this, Seth!" the other spat. "He's an assassin, he kills for a living! He probably enjoys it!" _

_Edward cleared his throat. "Regardless of my profession, I do not enjoy killing," he said coolly. "The best assassins do not kill needlessly." Apart from Jane, he thought sourly. Killing, for Jane, was more intoxicating than wine._

"_Enough!" the leader of the pack shouted, but he could barely be heard over the uproar. _

_Then, all of a sudden, everyone fell silent._

_A woman had entered the clearing. Her hair was as dark as the pupils of her eyes, and her eyes were icy. Like all the others, she was muscled, but unlike them she was lean. She wore a plain brown tunic and leggings._

"_Let him go, Sam," she said, and it was not a request. Her voice was cold enough to freeze every drop of blood in one's veins. "Let him go and rescue Bella." _

"_Leah," the leader said softly. "You know we can't –"_

"_Yes, you damn well can," she went on, still in that same voice. "You said once that you would give almost anything for me to be free. Free of this; free of you. Well, let him go and rescue Bella, and I will have my freedom." _

_No-one spoke for a moment. Then Sam sighed._

"_Go to the tower. We will not stop you." _

And now he is here, having climbed down the side of the tower and through the window, and Bella – dark, grieving Bella – is sitting on the side of her bed, gazing at him as if he were a fallen star.

He had not expected her to be so lovely.

Her hair is dark brown, and falls softly around elegant shoulders. Her eyes are deep enough to drown in. She is slender, with pale, perfect skin. She sits with hands folded in her lap, the picture of quiet acceptance – except for the sorrow hidden somewhere in her eyes.

"I remember you," she murmurs, in a musical, bell-like voice. "You were in my dream. Were you the one my letter found its way to?"

He nodded. "My name is Edward," he says quietly.

She smiles gently. "And I am Bella," she replies, "but you knew that already. It is good to meet you." For a moment they are both silent.

"Tell me something about you," she says at last. "You know about me: you read my letter. But I know nothing about you – nothing about the outside world at all, except what I have read in books."

He thinks. He does not intend to tell her that he is an assassin, nor that he was once a prince. "Whenever I am weary of my life," he says, "I go into the hills for a while. It's simpler there: I always feel sad when I have to leave them."

She looks pensive. "I've never seen hills, not real ones. I have seen pictures, of course, in books, but they always look as if they're not quite doing justice to the real thing."

Edwards feels a stab of pity. "Now, tell _me_ something about _you_," he orders. She turns towards him, startled. "Something no-one else knows, something that wasn't in your letter."

She lets out a tiny sigh. "When I was little, I made sure to learn the names of the stars. They are all I can see from my window, day or night. Sometimes, before I went to bed, I would talk to them. I made them my friends."

_Hours later…_

"What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?" she asks him.

He considers saying _you_, but thinks that might be too much too soon. "A forest in my homeland," he says, finally. "In summer, there were shafts of light through the leaves like golden veils, and the birdsong…"

"I'd like to see that," she whispers, almost to herself. "Where is your homeland?"

This is the question he was hoping to avoid. "You have heard of King Carlisle, the Peacemaker?"

She nods. "Yes. I thought that if ever I got out of here, I'd like to meet him. He seems so kind, and wise – the way you would want your father to be."

Edward cannot prevent himself from flinching. "Well, it is his kingdom I come from."

She smiles again, and her smile is like a candle in a darkened room. "If – if you are the right one, if you can bring me out of here, will you take me there someday?"

It hurts to hear this, because she is _exactly _the girl he would have liked to bring to his father with the words, "This is who I am going to marry." Nevertheless, he nods.

"Well," he says, "if you really want to get out of here, why don't we try now?"

Bella stops breathing for a minute, and her face is achingly beautiful with that look of hope on it. "Oh," she breathes. "Yes. _Please_."

He lifts her up – she is so light: she must eat like a bird – and goes to the window, and leaps out of it into the darkness of the night.


	5. Chapter 5

AN: I'm not dead! I'm just a very irregular updater. Please review.

When Leah sees Bella outside the tower for the first time, Bella's eyes are covered by a strip of silk gauze. She looks fragile, but she is far from defenceless, judging by the protective gaze of her rescuer.

Leah doesn't really know how to feel about Bella. It is because of the curse placed on her that the wolf-men (and one wolf-woman) exist; it is because of the curse that she cannot leave the forest (can't get away from constant reminders of Sam and the past and a love long lost); it is because of the curse that she lost Sam in the first place. But it is not as if Bella asked to be cursed. Nor did she ask some meddling fay to try to soften it by trapping her in a tower and surrounding her with shape-shifting guards.

It is not Bella's fault. But who else is there for Leah to blame?

It does not take long for Bella and the assassin – Edward, his name is – to explain why they have come to Leah. Bella is the one who does most of the talking: her voice is soft and musical like Leah remembers it. Edward occasionally adds something. His voice is clipped and upper-class and his tone says quite clearly that he doesn't trust Leah at all.

Their problem, it seems, is that although Edward succeeded in freeing Bella from the tower, and on that basis he is presumably her true love, the grief that she was originally cursed with is not gone. "It's still there, hiding at the back of my mind – I can feel it, all the time," Bella confesses, a trace of fear slipping into her voice.

Sam sent them to Leah because out of all the pack, Leah knows the most about the curse, and the spell that was meant to soften it. When she became one of the wolf-pack, and discovered why Sam had left her, she studied the wording of both enchantments in enormous detail, searching for a loophole. There were none, of course.

"The grief was the original curse," she tells them, as she pulls out the manuscript from a drawer. "The fay's spell came later. For reasons that are too complex to go into right now, the spell could only be written in the form of trapping Bella in a tower that only her true love could rescue her from. It's one of the standard spell formats, although she did some interesting and innovative things with it." Like tapping into the local legends of wolf shape-shifters to give Bella protection. "The idea was that the grief spell would be woven into the tower trap. Then, when Bella was freed from the tower, she would be freed from the grief at the same time."

"So why wasn't she?" Edward murmurs, his voice troubled.

Leah shrugs. "I don't know. Maybe it's a slow-acting spell, and the grief will gradually drain away, as she gets further from the tower. Or maybe it's to do with the true love part – I mean, it's all very well saying 'true love' in the spell, but in reality things are a lot more complicated than that." She sees a shadow of guilt cross the assassin's face, and wonders what he's thinking of.

"As far as I know," she adds, "being an assassin doesn't disqualify you from being someone's true love, so don't start thinking about stupid stuff like that." He nods, but she can see that her words didn't work. He's still thinking it. She hopes Bella finds out what he's thinking, and slaps him for it.

She says, only half-politely and only half-truthfully, that she's sorry she couldn't help: Bella thanks her anyway, her voice and demeanour as gentle as ever. Leah has to fight to bite back a scowl. She isn't afraid of Bella, but she has no intention of getting on the wrong side of a murderous assassin, her recent words to him notwithstanding.

There's a knock on the door. It's Nessie, come to tell Bella that Emily's finished making alterations to those tunics. Ah, of course. The dresses that Bella wore in the tower are certainly not suitable for travel, to say the least, Leah thinks viciously. At the moment Bella is wearing a shirt that belongs to one of the wolf-pack – it's big enough to be a long tunic on her – and tights. She looks beautiful in the ensemble (when does she ever not look beautiful?) but unorthodox.

Bella nods and tells Nessie that she'll be along in a minute. She asks Edward to go on ahead of her (and of course since they'll be travelling together he'll have to evaluate her clothing, Leah thinks, but why is Bella hanging back?). Edward looks uncomfortable with this idea, but reluctantly obeys, leaving for the cottage shared by the wolf-maidens – Emily and her kind, chosen by fate (Leah lets out a mental snort of contempt and cynicism) to care for the shape-shifters.

"I'm so sorry."

Leah whirls around to face Bella so fast that a wave of dizziness hits her.

"I'm sorry you had to go through so much because of me. I'm sorry about Sam, I'm sorry that you couldn't leave this place, I'm sorry you've been stuck here on account of someone you couldn't care less about, I'm sorry –"

"No," Leah says quickly and sharply, cutting her off before she can say more, because this is wrong, it's not supposed to be this way, Bella is supposed to remain unknowing, naïve, ignorant of the wrongs she causes, she's supposed to be perfect and innocent otherwise Leah can't blame her, Leah has to be the one blaming her, _Bella shouldn't be blaming herself._

"No," she says, this time with more conviction. "You didn't ask to be cursed. You didn't ask for a fay to meddle with the spell. It's not your fault, and I don't want or need your apology. I just want my freedom."

Bella looks relieved, and Leah feels a weight slide off her mind that she hadn't even realised was there. "Are you free now, then?" Bella says timidly.

"I think I am," Leah replies. "Or I will be. Anyway, I just need to pack my things and say goodbye to my brother, and then I'm out of here. So don't worry about it."

Bella's face lights up when she smiles, Leah notices. "I'm glad," Bella tells her softly. "I hope... I hope you'll be happy, Leah. Maybe I'll see you around sometime." She leaves then, not waiting for a reply.

"Maybe," Leah murmurs. She heads to her bedroom and starts to pack, contemplating the prospect of freedom.


End file.
